After one of Mozilla's core employees said that the open source outfit is not concerned with enterprise customers – and likely never will be – Microsoft's Internet Explorer team has jumped into the breach to proclaim its undying love for the enterprise.

With a blog post, Microsoft re-committed itself to providing support for Internet Explorer 8 and 9 until January 2020, taking aim at Mozilla's insistance that it will not support preceding versions of Firefox as each new edition ships.

__________________
You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump

To be fair, IE9 has given me relative little trouble over the last few months when developing css/javascript. IE8 a little, and IE7/IE6 ... well, let's not go there.

The problem with supporting browsers for so long is that the web is moving *so* fast that supporting IE8 until 2020 is just completely out of perspective/context. The www is just 20 years old, and a lot of new stuff happened in the last 10 years...

__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

Heh, my first thought on reading this yesterday, "Oh great, Microsoft just committed to holding back the Internet for another ten plus years" -> counting time for IE15 to be a total rewrite and rename ofc :-)

Lets not forget that just a a few years back things weren't moving *at all*. IE7 is basically just IE6 with tabs. It solved a bug or two, but introduced a few others.
The real step forward only came in March 2009 with IE8, which supports pretty much everything you'd expect from a CSS-compliant browser (Although it does have a few problems, but nothing as major as in IE6/7).

Things are definitely not at the level they "should" be, but rather than criticizing Microsoft for moving to slow, I would applaud them for moving *at all*. You catch more with honey than with vinegar and all that

__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

rather than criticizing Microsoft for moving to slow, I would applaud them for moving *at all*. You catch more with honey than with vinegar and all that

No I won't. Microsoft has lost half its market share due to its non-compliance and continues to fight everyone else tooth and nail. See WebGL, SVG, WebM, Ogg. I mention SVG even though they have half attempted at supporting it but that effort is only two years old while SVG has been around for over a decade.

I've had many an online battle with Chris Wilson who was lead developer of IE. He now works at Google and last told me, "If I was really in charge, things would have turned out a lot different (with IE)."

I had such a heated exchange with the Microsoft guy in charge of SVG (I forgot his name) that I told him what orifices he could crawl into.

Congratulating Microsoft is like congratulating GM on the great job they're doing in the car industry now that they've botched that all up and will forever be playing catch up...begrudgingly. That's how Microsoft does things. Cause they're losing market share, the internet as a whole and mobile in particular. They don't want to improve their browser but they have to.